Seeing Mars through the eyes of a geologist
4 August 2012, By Amina Khan
a Mars rover themselves.
"Until you're actually staring at a rock outcrop and
walking around it, you don't have the intuition of
what this rover's going to do on Mars," said Ashwin
Vasavada, one of Grotzinger's two deputies,
recalling a 2008 field trip.
"He would ask us, 'If you were the rover, where
would you drive? Where would you point your
camera? How would we, as a team, explore this
particular site, if this was what was in front of us on
Mars?' "
Mars. Image: NASA
--Grotzinger, 55, is tall and rangy, with blue eyes
constantly drawn to the ground.
John Grotzinger is leading a march up a mountain
near Death Valley, the rocks around him streaked
red, brown and purple-gray.
The geologist has often brought staff members up
here, away from the blinking control rooms and
glaring light of test beds at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory about 250 miles to the southwest.
Engineers who normally fiddle with electronics will
smash rocks with geologists' hammers. Planetary
scientists will practice tracking layers of rock to
piece together the story of the land.
As a college student at upstate New York's Hobart
College in the 1970s, he played lacrosse and took
a "rocks for jocks" geology course to fulfill a
requirement during his third year.
He got hooked.
Don Woodrow, his geology professor there,
recalled how the young Grotzinger would read his
textbook in a room near Woodrow's office. An "Oh
my God!" would break the bookish quiet, then the
sound of running footsteps, and Grotzinger would
burst through the door to rave about some new
geology factoid.
It's a break from the lab grind, but that's not the
point. As project scientist for the Mars Science
Laboratory, the NASA rover scheduled to land on
"It just captured him," Woodrow said.
the Red Planet on Sunday night, Grotzinger guides
hundreds of researchers who work with rover
Still, Grotzinger's uncle, Preston Cloud - himself a
instruments that will capture video of the terrain,
famed geologist and paleontologist - thought the
scoop up soil or shoot lasers at rocks, in search of lad was too scattered. Paul Hoffman, a Harvard
the ingredients for life.
professor emeritus of geology, recalled Cloud's
request: "I have a nephew who's just like a big
Once the rover - nicknamed Curiosity - touches
hound. He has lots of energy but no focus. Take
down, the crew will see the landscape through the him up to the Northwest Territories and see if you
machine's eyes only. These trips into the
can make something out of him."
forbidding desert help them to develop a gut sense
of the Martian terrain and to start thinking a bit like
Hoffman obliged, and soon found that his new
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field assistant stood out. Other students would gape "It was really lucky for the Mars program that there
at the Canadian sky or soak in the scenery, but not was a sedimentologist like John ... ready to
Grotzinger.
recognize what they were seeing," said Dave
Rubin, a researcher with the U.S. Geological
He has "eyes a bit like a wolf, when he looks at a Survey in Santa Cruz.
rock. It's like he's drilling holes in the rock, the
intensity of his inspection," Hoffman said.
"That experience is burned in my mind forever,"
Grotzinger said.
For much of his post-Ph.D. career, the geologist
kept his feet planted firmly on Earth. He combed
Decades of staring at rocks had paid off. But the
ancient sedimentary rocks for signs of early life. He Mars mission was a turning point in other ways,
took trips around the globe, family in tow, to collect said Grotzinger's wife, Donna.
550 million-year-old specimens in Namibia and
Oman.
"John suddenly realized he was really good at
working in a group, building a consensus and
He would send them to his lab and pore over
interacting with people," she said. "A lot of
them, charting the rise and fall of ancient oceans by scientists don't want to do that. ... It's like herding
analyzing the carbon isotopes they contained.
cats, a lot of times."
His move into Mars research was something of a
happy accident.
In 2001, a friend suggested he apply to NASA for
a spot in the Mars Exploration Rover program,
whose twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity were on a
hunt for signs of water on the surface of the Red
Planet. Almost on a whim, Grotzinger applied.
Competition for these slots was fierce, but to his
surprise he was picked to be a scientist with the
90-day mission.
--Grotzinger kneels in the test bed at JPL, with
about 30 scientists and engineers. Cellphones flash
as lab-coated researchers hop in front of cameras,
mugging an SUV-sized test robot - the spitting
image of Curiosity - in the background.
It's the first time many have seen the test rover up
close, and they are as excited as fans are to catch
a glimpse of a Hollywood star.
"I thought, 'Gosh, this is gonna be fun ... and after More pragmatically, they now get a chance to see
90 days I'll go home,' " he said.
how the rover moves and how the instruments work
together. Grotzinger is taking note himself, studying
But then Opportunity began sending back images a plume of dust billowing up from the rover's
from its landing site, Meridiani Planum, a flat, ashy whining drill, asking engineers about the plume's
expanse near the planet's equator, that stopped
potential to contaminate other instruments.
him in his tracks.
Sitting in the sand, the geologist is focused on the
Scientists expected the plain to be full of longdetails. But sometimes the job requires him to step
hardened magma spewing from the Red Planet's
back, take a wider view.
innards.
In a meeting a few weeks ago, Grotzinger realized
Instead, Meridiani was filled with sedimentary
that with all eyes trained on the place the rover will
layers eerily reminiscent of the structures
explore - a mound in the middle of Gale Crater - the
Grotzinger had studied in Namibia. And he soon
landing site had been neglected. He decided to
saw small round "blueberries" made of hematite, an map the site in detail, with topography, mineralogy
iron-rich mineral that indicated the past presence of and other data.
water.
By temperament, geologists tend to prefer to draw
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their maps solo. But there was no time. So he cut
the site into 68 squares and put out a call to the
whole rover team to pitch in.
Foreign scientists jumped at the chance. Some
decided to fly in early to help. Each researcher took
at least one square, and each mapped their foursided universe.
Grotzinger took in the whole picture. For the most
part, to his delight, the edges lined up.
(c)2012 Los Angeles Times
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APA citation: Seeing Mars through the eyes of a geologist (2012, August 4) retrieved 18 June 2017 from
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